Making sense of the infodemic – A bibliometric analysis of publications on COVID-19 in trauma and orthopedics

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted an explosion of publications to report, understand, further research, and manage this condition. While publications are analyzing the bibliometrics on this condition, there are none available specifically for the impact of COVID-19 on trauma and orthopedics. The aim of this study, therefore, was to perform a bibliometric analysis on COVID-19 and trauma and orthopedics to assess its impact on the specialty. A search for articles on COVID-19 concerning trauma and orthopedics, with the keywords: “COVID-19, New coronavirus, SARS-Cov-2, Orthopedic*, trauma, bone, and joint” were performed on the June 19, 2020, using SCOPUS and PUBMED and this resulted in 272 and 887 articles, respectively. Later, on the same day, we searched for orthopedic journals exclusively and extracted 258 articles from 58 journals. Furthermore, we analyzed the Altmetric data through the dimensions website to find the most popular articles on social media on this topic. After analyzing the data, we found that review articles were the most commonly published articles. The leading journal publishing this content were; The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (JBJS) American (35), followed by the Journal of Arthroplasty (22). There were 6936 authors involved in publishing 887 articles in 2020. Most articles were published by Vaishya (5) followed by Liang (5), and Iyengar (5). Analysis of Altmetric data showed a total number of citations of 5000 with a mean of 1.98. MedRxiv with 781 publications and 1616 citations was the preprint server with the most publications on dimensions. We studied details of the article with maximum AAS score of 25226 is with 840 citations. We have listed useful protocols from the search and top five cited articles from each search strategy. Publications on COVID-19 commenced from the 9(th) week of this year and have increased exponentially. Review articles (PubMed) and articles (Scopus) were the most published. The JBJS (Am) and J Arthroplasty have published the maximum number of articles on COVID-19. We found that for a fast evolving condition and for the short term, altmetrics may be better indicators than citations to follow directions of research. Publications with a low number of citations could have immense social media attention. This study should help in quantifying the value of research and publications related to orthopedics and trauma aspects of COVID-19 and therefore help the readers, researchers, and health-care providers to use this information effectively.